John Harris - Management Skills in Social Care: A Handbook for Social Care Managers

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MANAGEMENT SKILLS IN SOCIAL CARE

To Bobbie, Karl, Lydia, Seth and Vicky: our long-suffering partners and children.

First published 1991 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor Francis Group, an iriforma business

Copyright John Harris, Des Kelly 1991, 1992

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 90038652

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-33518-9 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-429-44391-6 (ebk)

The Report Residential Care: A Positive Choice recommended that all senior posts in residential care should be filled by staff with social work qualifications by 1993. Apart from anything else the lack of available training places means that this recommendation will not be implemented in the near future, although it remains as a challenge. But even if it could be implemented how many of those senior staff would have had the kind of hands on management training this handbook provides?

The Handbook for Social Care Managers entitled Management Skills in Social Care comes at a time when the lessons it has to teach are sorely needed. The crucial role that good social care managers play is coming to be better understood and appreciated. They are the people who set the tone in social care settings and whose influence can enhance the quality of life of service users. But when do they have the time and where can they go to learn the skills they need?

Management Skills in Social Care is written in a clear direct style that makes it easy reading. It is full of practical suggestions for improving the management techniques of both new managers and those who are already in management roles. Its do it yourself style involves the reader directly and provides her with a rough and ready assessment of her performance.

Managers are very often promoted on the strength of competence as practitioners with little or no guidance on how to tackle their new responsibilities. I very much welcome this attempt to fill a widely felt gap. I am sure Management Skills in Social Care will appeal to a wide variety of professionals who have management responsibilities both inside the residential care sector and in the wider social care field.

Lady Gillian Wagner

Chair of the Independent

Review of Residential Care

This is a practice-based handbook. It has emerged from our experiences as managers and from our reflections on those experiences, and it is rooted in the readers experience of the issues which it tackles. It is a handbook rather than a book about management theories. It is to management what a recipe book is to cooking. Just as in a recipe book you can look up boiling an egg or cooking a three-course meal, but you will search in vain for a discussion of the physics of conducted heat, so in this handbook you can look up running a staff meeting or team development but you will search in vain for a learned discussion of management theory. You may, of course, decide to modify a particular recipe!

We were originally convinced of the need for such a handbook by the growing recognition of the importance of management in the personal social services, alongside the relative neglect of management in residential and day care settings which existed up to a few years ago. The book began as a response to this neglect. However our experience of working with many managers from the public, private and voluntary sectors and from a variety of service settings has led us to extend our remit to social care more generally. In the main the content of the book reflects this shift towards a wider audience, while still retaining our initial concern for residential and day care services.

The book also had its origins in our awareness of managers often being promoted on the basis of their competence as practitioners and then feeling ill-equipped to embrace the problems and possibilities offered by a management position. As a practice-based handbook emphasis is laid on ways in which managers of social care provision can improve their expertise. As such, we think that it has something to offer to newly-appointed managers, to practitioners who are considering the possibility of a management post and to managers already in post who want to review their performance. It may be helpful to the supervisors of managers in social care settings, to advisers linked to these services and to educators and trainers. In addition, the content of much of the book could be usefully applied to the management of field social work services.

How you make use of the book will, to some extent, depend on which of the above categories you fall into. The book can be worked through in detail in order to come to grips with the overall scope of a particular managerial post or it can be dipped into as a source of easily accessible information on specific topics. Hints on using the material are provided at the beginning of each chapter. Throughout the book you will be invited in self-directed activities to reflect on your experience, to think through issues, to take part in exercises, to contemplate doing things differently. We urge you to accept these invitations when you come across them. We firmly believe that adults learn effectively when they are actively involved in their own development. We have deliberately adopted a format which facilitates self-assessment and which enables you to personalize the books subject matter. This type of format is also used as a way of dealing with both the range and size of settings in which readers work. We cannot address the detailed way in which such factors affect your job. Using the activities we have included in the book, you can.

There is much talk about the quality of the service provided in social care settings but high-quality care seldom just happens. It has to be managed. Accordingly, this book stresses the contribution of management. As such it does not address direct practice with service users. Nevertheless we believe that effective management is essential to the improvement of day-to-day practice. The book stems from our belief that management matters.

John Harris

Des Kelly

There are a number of people to whom we are grateful for their help in enabling this book finally to be produced:

People on the receiving end of services for which we have been responsible.

Colleagues we have worked with in a range of settings.

Managers who have been subjected to our ideas on a series of Social Care Association courses; these courses have enabled us to test out our thinking and refine our ideas and their presentation.

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